This invention relates to tufting machines, and more particularly to a needle arrangement and drive mechanism therefor to select one of at least two needles or neither needle to stitch or skip a stitch in accordance with a pattern.
Controlled needle tufting machines are known in the art for selectively engaging and disengaging, in skip-stitch fashion, various of the needles in accordance with a program during each reciprocatory cycle of the needle driving push rods. Basically these machines render selective needles or groups of needles inoperative while the remainder of the needles are operative to pierce and penetrate the backing fabric upon each stroke of the push rods. Examples of such machines are illustrated in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,115,856; 3,259,088; 3,881,432 and 3,986,465. Such machines have been very successful, especially for producing bed spreads, and in the case of individually controlled needle tufting machines have been widely accepted for overtufting a design into a pretufted fabric, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,693,190.
In these machines each needle cooperates with its own respective loop seizing hook and each hook cooperates with but one needle. However, although it is believed that sometime ago attempts were made to provide a tufting machine wherein one of two needles could be selected to sew with a single loop seizing member on a particular drive stroke or machine cycle, no such machine is known to have been developed or constructed. If such a machine were developed wherein at least one of two needles could be selected to form a stitch in a given row of stitching, the needles could be threaded with different yarns, such as yarns of different color, and for any particular stitch, the color could be selected.
If such a machine is to be successful it is mandatory that the complexity of the mechanism for performing the needle selection and for driving the selected needle must be minimized. Additionally, since there normally would be at least twice as many needles mounted in a given machine as compared to a conventional tufting machine or a conventional controlled needle tufting machine, the needle mounting structure clearly must be compactly arranged.